[1] Comrade Steiner, you left the Workers League in September 1978, and Comrade Brenner, you resigned in January 1979.
[2] The Robertson group wrote in March 1998: “The new SEP Web site, rapidly expanding via the gaseous ‘great Thoughts’ of David North, is the latest in a growing junk belt of virtual fantasy worlds, where posturing little grey men with gigantic egos and dubious politics can play at revolution. . . . To pretend dumping some documents into cyberspace is any substitute for the hard fight—in the real world, among real people—to build a revolutionary workers party, only confirms the total depths of cynicism and humbug for which the Northites are infamous.”
[4] W.W. Rostow, (1916–2003) was one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War. His 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto proposed a “take-off model” of economic modernization.
[5] Report to WSWS International Editorial Board, January 22–27, 2006. www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/02/ssdn-f27.html
[6] David North, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2014), p. 165.
[7] My essay on dialectical philosophy, a detailed critique of Marx After Marxism by Professor Tom Rockmore, was originally published May 2–3, 2006 on the World Socialist Web Site, nearly two weeks before you sent us your document. For reasons best known to yourselves, you chose to ignore it.
[8] Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism (London: New Park Publications, 1971), p. 101.
[9] ibid., p. 73.
[10] The ICFI does not simply talk about the dialectical method. It seeks to apply it as an instrument of political analysis. For example, in a lecture on the nature of trade unionism given in Australia in 1998, I sought to demonstrate how dialectical logic sheds light on the nature of this complex social form. See “Why Are the Trade Unions Hostile to Socialism?” in The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, pp. 137–139.
[11] David North, Leon Trotsky and the Development of Marxism (Oak Park: Socialist Equality Party/Mehring Books, 2013), p. 12.
[12] David North, Gerry Healy and His Place in the History of the Fourth International (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991), pp. 79–80.
[13] The agenda of the 2005 summer school was as follows: Lecture I: The Russian Revolution and the unresolved historical problems of the twentieth century (David North); Lecture II: Marxism versus revisionism on the eve of the twentieth century (David North); Lecture III: The origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done? (David North); Lecture IV: Marxism, history and the science of perspective (David North); Lecture V: World War I: The breakdown of capitalism (Nick Beams); Lecture VI: Socialism in one country or permanent revolution (Bill Van Auken); Lecture VII: Marxism, art and the Soviet debate over “proletarian culture” (David Walsh); Lecture VIII: The 1920s: the road to depression and fascism (Nick Beams); Lecture IX: The rise of fascism in Germany and the collapse of the Communist International (Peter Schwarz).
[14] V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), pp. 400–401, [emphasis in the original].
[15] V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 14 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 325, [emphasis in the original].
[16] Quoted in On Pragmatism, by Cornelis De Waal (Wadsworth Philosophical Topics, 2005), p. 73, [emphasis in the original].
[17] ibid., p. 74.
[18] This is a passage from the fourth lecture, which included a substantial section refuting Sir Karl Popper’s attack on Marxism. Your document contains not a single reference to this lecture and its attack on Popper’s empiricism.
[19] Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, Volume 3 (London: New Park Publications, 1974), p. 161.
[20] ibid., p. 162.
[21] ibid.
[22] Leon Trotsky, “Philosophical Tendencies of Bureaucratism,” in The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1928–29 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981), p. 396.
[30] V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1961), p. 412, [emphasis in the original].
[31] ibid., [emphasis in the original].
[32] ibid., p. 413, [emphasis in the original].
[33] ibid., p. 20–21, [emphasis in the original].
[34] David North, The Crisis of American Democracy: The Presidential Elections of 2000 and 2004 (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2004), pp. 104–105, [emphasis in the original].
[35] North, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, pp. 205–207.
[36] North, The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century, pp. 159–162.
[37] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 4 (New York, International Publishers, 1975), p. 130.
[38] The Case of Leon Trotsky (New York: Merit Publishers, 1969), pp. 584–85.
[39] A few characteristic passages: “Thus, if we contend that biology provides an impetus to genital sex, we must also be willing to admit that biology provides an impetus to oral sex—which is of course a type of sex that can be gratified by either gender. And, for that matter, in shifting libido to the penis, biology doesn’t at the same time compel the penis to seek gratification only in the vagina: on the contrary, the mouth and anus—again, of either gender, will do as well, to say nothing of masturbation.” And: “Surely, there is nothing mature or fully developed about a genital sexuality in which the sexual act consists solely of a man mounting a woman and thrusting his penis into her vagina until ejaculation; on the contrary, this kind of behavior is clearly a mark of extreme repression, of the constriction of sexuality to a mechanical, inhuman coldness.”
[40] David North, The Workers League and the Founding of the Socialist Equality Party (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1996), pp. 36-37.
[41] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 25 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), p. 253.
[42] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 22 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), p. 499.
[43] ibid., pp. 499–500.
[44] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 24 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), pp. 304–305.
[45] Karl Höchberg (1853–1885) was a wealthy supporter of the socialist movement.
[46] Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871) was one of the earliest leaders of the young workers movement in Germany in the late 1830s and 1840s. He promoted a form of utopian communism that Engels described as “sentimental Love-mongering.”
[47] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1991), pp. 283–284.
[48] Georgi Plekhanov, The Development of the Monist View of History (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), pp. 118–19.
[49] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 27 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990), p. 520.
[50] Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1977), p. 18.
[51] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, (New York: International Publishers, 1976) pp. 52–53, [emphasis in the original].
[52] ibid., p. 37.
[53] ibid., p. 53.
[54] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 4, p. 37, [emphasis in the original].
[55] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 24, p. 306.
[56] ibid., pp. 306–307.
[57] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 71.
[58] ibid., p. 72.
[59] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 354.
[60] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, p. 7.
[61] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 24, p. 87.
[62] V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 25, p. 430.
[63] “How is Scientific Socialism Possible,” in Selected Writings of Eduard Bernstein, 1900–1921, ed. and trans. Manfred Steger (New Jersey: Humanity Books, 1996), p. 94.
[64] ibid., p. 95.
[65] ibid., p. 96.
[66] ibid., p. 97.
[67] ibid.
[68] Leo Panitch, Socialist Register 2000 (Suffolk, 1999), p. vii.
[69] Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (New York: MacMillan, 1972), p. 33.
[70] ibid., p. 33–34.
[71] ibid., p. 45.
[72] ibid., p. 46.
[73] Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, “Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination,” Socialist Register 2000, p. 2.
[74] ibid., p. 5.
[75] Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism, (London and New York: Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1987), pp. 67–68. [Italicized words indicate those directly quoted in my lecture last August.]
[76] Hendrik De Man, The Psychology of Socialism, (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1972), p. 13. Originally published in 1926 as Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus.
[77] ibid., p. 28.
[78] Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 63.
[79] ibid., pp. 63–64.
[80] ibid., p. 73.
[81] ibid., pp. 73–74, [emphasis in the original].
[82] ibid., p. 74.
[83] ibid., p. 75.
[84] ibid., [emphasis in the original].
[85] ibid., p. 76.
[86] ibid.
[87] ibid., p. 17.
[88] Wilhelm Reich, What Is Class Consciousness? (London: Liberation, 1971), p. 18.
[89] ibid., p. 22.
[90] ibid., p. 23.
[91] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990), p. 398.
[92] Permit me to point out that Comrade David Walsh addressed the issue of the cultural work of the socialist movement, not only in Germany but throughout Europe, in the very important lecture that he delivered at last year’s summer’s school (“Marxism, Art, and the Soviet Debate over ‘Proletarian Culture’”). Unfortunately, your document makes no reference whatever to this lecture.
[93] Reich, What Is Class Consciousness, p. 30.
[94] ibid., p. 28.
[95] ibid., p. 35.
[96] ibid., p. 53.
[97] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. xiii.
[98] ibid., p. xiii–xiv.
[99] ibid., p. xxi.
[100] ibid., p. xxvi, [emphasis in the original].
[101] ibid., p. 320.
[102] Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership,” in The Spanish Revolution (1931–39) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 358.
[103] ibid., p. 364.
[104] Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), pp. 462–467.
[105] Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 55.
[106] Comrade Brenner, you have a somewhat different programmatic agenda, as you inform us in your Utopia document that: “Leaving aside the feasibility (or desirability) of guaranteeing orgasm, there remains a vital point here: ending the tyranny of the genitals is as essential as ending the tyranny of economics if a genuinely human existence is to be possible.” To comment on this passage would serve only to diminish its comic effect.
[107] Culture and Revolution in the Thought of Leon Trotsky (London: Porcupine Press, 1999), pp. 54–55.
[108] ibid., p. 57.
[109] Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism, p. 118.
[110] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991), p. 39.
[111] ibid., p. 68.
[112] Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5, pp. 38–49, [emphasis in the original].